


171. karma's payment

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [127]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, Pain Sharing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2016-11-04
Packaged: 2018-08-28 23:45:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8467669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Sarah’s back hurts sometimes. It always feels like she’s cut it, but when she turns around and stares at it in the mirror there’s nothing there. Just her back, smooth and unmarked.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [warnings: reference to self-harm and abuse]

Sarah’s back hurts sometimes. It always feels like she’s cut it, but when she turns around and stares at it in the mirror there’s nothing there. Just her back, smooth and unmarked.

\--

Sarah gets hungry sometimes, which doesn’t make sense – S feeds her enough, and sometimes she’ll get hungry _while_ she’s eating. Her stomach growls and roars and moans and she’s _feeding_ it but it doesn’t matter.

_It’s like I have another stomach_ , she tells Siobhan. _It’s like I’ve got two_. But S doesn’t listen to her, just makes her take a second helping even though Sarah is so full she feels like she’s going to throw up. She eats. She concentrates on the feeling of that second stomach – like if she tries hard enough, she can send the food there instead.

But she can’t. She’s so full. Her stomach won’t stop growling.

\--

Sarah is hungry and Sarah is bruised – except she isn’t bruised – and Sarah is scratching at her back all the time. Sarah dreams she’s chasing a shape, blurred like it’s underwater, and if she could just catch it everything would make sense—

But she doesn’t, and she doesn’t, and she wakes up hungry. Again. Sometimes it feels like she’s never going to stop being hungry.

\--

Helena’s back hurts sometimes. Helena gets hungry sometimes. Helena bruises sometimes – except she doesn’t, because she looks in the mirror and there’s nothing there. Helena feels so full that she can’t eat, even when she’s starving. Helena dreams she is running towards something, and if she could just reach it everything would make sense—

But she doesn’t, and she doesn’t, and she wakes up and presses her hand instinctively to her belly. Something is in there, something with feet. It turns somersaults, only it doesn’t. But Helena knows it’s there. She can feel it. She goes to Tomas and whispers: _Tomas, I was reading the story of the Virgin Mary and_

\--

Sarah wakes up with her cheekbone stinging, hard, like a punch and she knows before she puts her hand to her face that there isn’t going to be anything there. She puts her other hand to her belly to feel for Kira

\--

and she knows before her palm reaches her skin that there isn’t going to be anything there.

\--

“Who are you?” breathes the latest clone, pinning Sarah to the ground, and Sarah’s hand finds the rebar and Sarah shows her.

\--

And Helena stumbles backwards, clutching her side, and on the ground her not-Beth screams and clutches her side. The same side. Like being a mirror.

“I know you,” Helena whispers fervently, because suddenly: she does. “I _know_ you.”

“No you don’t,” not-Beth says shakily. She’s dry-heaving, curling in on herself. Her eyes are going wide and wider and she knows, Helena can tell that she knows.

“Are you ever hungry,” Helena whispers, and on the ground her copy starts to weep.

\--

Sarah lies there shaking from a pain that isn’t there and the motorcycle starts, and her copy is gone. She’s gone. She is nothing but a starburst of pain in Sarah’s side and the low grumble of hunger in Sarah’s stomach and she was _here_ and now she’s gone.

Sarah doesn’t miss her.

Only:

Sarah does.

\--

“Can you feel it?”

“You do feel it.”

“I feel it too! It’s _us_.”

\--

Sarah shoots herself in the chest and it hurts. She lies there on the ground and waits for the pain to go away. It doesn’t; it just keeps hurting, low like a siren wailing in the back of her mind. Maybe, she thinks, it’ll never go away. Maybe this is Helena, now: a dull echo of her final pain, going on forever and ever ‘til they both die. To her pain-dizzy mind this makes sense. She stands up and makes her wobbling, stumbling way towards the door.

\--

She wakes up on Art’s couch in the middle of the night.

She’s still hungry.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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